Facebook working on a “Clear History” tool for web traffic

Facebook announced during its developers conference today that it is working on a new account tool that would allow users to delete any web browsing history that the social media platform has logged.

“Clear History” will give users insight which companies send information to Facebook. The websites and applications they visit will be listed. Users can then choose to delete the information and disallow Facebook from storing their data. The company will still pass along anonymized basic demographic information for its advertising clients such as the age and gender of a person who liked a certain entity.

The tool is still months away from launch. Facebook is looking for input from government, academic and privacy stakeholders.

Facebook is also adding a tool to its Messenger service, allowing users to delete messages they’ve sent to recipients, after it was reported that old messages sent by Mark Zuckerberg to other people had been wiped from conversations. This led to speculation that executives have access to a more robust deletion feature.

Jules Wang is News Editor for Pocketnow and one of the hosts of the Pocketnow Weekly Podcast. He came onto the team in 2014 as an intern editing and producing videos and the podcast while he was studying journalism at Emerson College. He graduated the year after and entered into his current position at Pocketnow, full-time.